AMBROSE

See also:

• AMBROSE PHILIPS (c. 1675-1749)
• PHILIPS, JOHN (1676-1708)
• PHILIPS, KATHARINE (1631-1664)

PHILIPS (c. 1675-1749)  , English poet, was born in Shropshire of a Leicestershire family . He was educated at Shrewsbury school and St John's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in 1699 . He seems to have lived chiefly at Cambridge until he resigned his fellowship in 1708, and his pastorals probably belong to this period . He worked for Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and his Pastorals opened the 6th volume of Tonson's Miscellanies (1709), which also contained the pastorals of Pope . Philips was a stanch Whig, and a friend of Steele and Addison . In Nos . 22, 23, 30 and 32 (1713) of the Guardian he was injudiciously praised as the only worthy successor of Spenser . The writer of the papers, who is supposed to have been Thomas Tickell, pointedly ignored Pope's pastorals . In the Spectator Addison applauded him for his simplicity, and for having written English eclogues unencumbered by the machinery of classical mythology . Pope's jealousy was roused, and he sent an anonymous contribution to the Guardian (No . 40) in which he drew an ironical comparison between his own and Philip's pastorals, censuring himself and praising Philips's worst passages . Philips is said to have threatened to cane Pope with a rod he kept hung up at Button's coffee-house for the purpose .

It was at Pope's

request that Gay burlesqued Philips's pastorals in his Shepherd's Week, but the parody pleased by the very quality of simplicity which it was intended to ridicule . Samuel Johnson describes the relations between Pope and Philips as a " perpetual reciprocation of malevolence." Pope lost no opportunity of scoffing at Philips, who figured in the Bathos and the Dunciad, as Macer in the Characters; and in the " Instructions to a porter how to find Mr Curll's authors " he is a " Pindaric writer in red stockings." In 1718 he started a Whig paper, The Freethinker, in conjunction with Hugh Boulter, then vicar of St Olave's, Southwark . He had been made justice of the peace for Westminster, and in 1717 a commissioner for the lottery, and when Boulter was made archbishop of Armagh, Philips accompanied him as secretary . He sat in the Irish parliament for Co . Armagh, was secretary to the lord chancellor in 1726, and in 1733 became a judge of the prerogative court . His patron died in 1742, and six years later Philips returned to London, where he died on the 18th of June 1749 . His contemporary reputation rested on his pastorals and epistles, particularly the description of winter addressed by him from Copenhagen (1709) to the earl of Dorset . In T . H . Ward's English Poets, however, he is represented by two of the simple and charming pieces addressed to the infant children of Lord Carteret and of Daniel Pulteney . These were scoffed at by Swift as " little flams on Miss Carteret," and earned for Philips from Henry Carey the nickname of " Namby-Pamby." Philips's works are an abridgment of Bishop Hacket's Life of John Williams (1700); The Thousand and One Days; Persian Tales . (1722), from the French of F .

Potis de la Croix; three plays: The Distrest

Mother (1712), an adaptation of Racine's Andromaque; The Briton (1722); Humfrey, duke of Gloucester (1723) . Many of his poems, which included some translations from Sappho, Anacreon and Pindar, were published separately, and a collected edition appeared in 1748 .